Gulf Coast beach resorts fill up for holiday weekend

John McCusker / The Times-PicayuneNorman Ostrov of Florida takes a picture of a beached closed sign on Grand Isle on Tuesday, Despite the oil spill, the usual crowds were expected to descend on Gulf Coast beaches for the Memorial Day weekend.

Real estate agents say they're expecting the usual throngs to flock to the Gulf Coast this Memorial Day weekend after a surge of last-minute bookings. But, they say, beach house, hotel and condo rentals are still down for the peak summer months, as tourists cautiously watch the spread of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf.

Memorial Day is the official kickoff to summer beach season, when residents across the metro area pack up and head to vacation spots along the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Agents at Brett Robinson Vacation Rentals said they expect reservations for this weekend to be down about 10 percent from last year -- much less disastrous than predicted last month, when they got one cancellation for every reservation they booked.

Marie Curren, marketing director for the company that handles more than 2,000 vacation rental properties in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, believes visitors who have been carefully monitoring the oil spill's 72-hour forecasts are now convinced that the beaches will be clear for the holiday weekend, so they're taking advantage of deep discounts to book hotel rooms, condos and vacation homes.

On Thursday before noon, the company booked almost 100 reservations, or nearly 5 percent of their total inventory, she said.

Nancy Hamilton from the Convention and Visitors Bureau in Fort Myers also reported steady bookings with few cancellations. And Sarah Kuzma from Meyer Real Estate, which handles about 1,800 rentals in the Gulf Shores area, also saw a last-minute surge in bookings that pushed the company within 3 percent of last year's Memorial Day totals. "The tide has turned," Kuzma said.

But while real estate agents are busy filling rooms for the weekend, visitors for the normally packed beach months of June, July and August are waiting to place new bookings -- and fretting over whether to cancel existing reservations.

As a result, the Gulf Coast states are preparing advertising campaigns showing unaffected beaches, open marinas and beautiful nature sanctuaries to correct misperceptions that the entire Gulf Coast looks like the oil-stained Louisiana marshland.

"This Gulf coastline is a very long piece of water," said Richard Forester, head of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, bemoaning misleading reports including a recent network-news segment that wrongly said that there was no fishing anywhere in Louisiana or Mississippi. Out-of-state tourists, who may have no sense of the geography, don't understand that only a small segment of the coast has been affected so far, he said.

"Except for three beaches in Louisiana, all of the Gulf's beaches are open; they are safe and they are clean," said President Barack Obama during a Thursday press conference as he urged tourists to support the Gulf Coast.

Jami Riley Ellsworth is one of those travelers trying to decide whether to make her trip to the beach in late June.

"From Ohio; don't want to cancel," she wrote on a Facebook page called Visit Pensacola. "But not knowing what is going to happen with the oil is kind of scary. We have two kids."

Scattered reports of tar balls on beaches have made many tourists skittish. As recently as Wednesday, about 100 dime-sized tar balls washed up on Pensacola sand. Similar but unrelated sticky orbs were found on the Florida Keys in mid-May, and on Dauphin Island and Gulf Shores.

Also raising concerns were reports that the oil slick would foul Florida beaches because it was about to enter the powerful "loop current," a ribbon of warm water that begins in the Gulf of Mexico and wraps around Florida. But officials soon said that the current had shifted west, putting southern Florida out of immediate danger.

Last week, the Visit Pensacola visitors bureau and other similar organizations purchased a full-page national newspaper ad, with photos of children playing in the water, said spokeswoman Laura Lee. "We're not going to tell them to come here if it's not safe," Lee said.

But because potential visitors may be wary of safety messages coming from tourism organizations, Lee's bureau created the Facebook page so that Ellsworth and others can candidly discuss their oil-spill concerns and so that fellow tourists currently lounging on the beaches can post photos of clear water and pristine beaches.

As further reassurance, the bureau's website, VisitPensacola.com, added a live beach cam that shows real-time images of the vacation spot.

All to prove that, despite reports to the contrary, "our coast is clear," said Lee.

Lee said that she too might be much more cautious if she didn't know about how frequently the air and water is monitored and how far away the spill now lies. But despite being 8-1/2 months pregnant, she said, she swam at the beach both days last weekend and ate fresh fish, caught by her husband 20 miles off shore. So she believes in giving visitors accurate data, photos and solid information, she said.

Forester agrees. "If we get a ton of oil washed up on the beach, we'll say so," he said. "We're not hiding anything."